Sometimes I start blog posts I don't finish. There are a lot of different reasons this can happen.
About a week ago, I started a post on the Police Orchestras of Ethiopia. Because it's a topic I don't know much about, I started by doing a little basic research - looking up some of my favorite Ethiopian songs on Youtube. There's one particular song that's fairly well-known in certain circles in the West called Muziqawi Silt, by the Wallias Band. I went looking for it in a private window, because while I still use Youtube a lot, I have found that over time I trust Youtube less and less with identifiable personal data.
And one of the sidebar video recommendations on this video was a video titled "How Anti Racism Hurts Black People".
And that's where I stopped writing.
I am a big fan of the hip-hop group clipping. A few days ago they released a new single, and I think it is an amazing single. Right now, I think my favorite part of it is in the first verse. Daveed Diggs starts going over the history of institutional racism in America, brilliantly and eloquently. It's very much along the same lines as the Sedition Ensemble record I wrote about two weeks ago. And then in the middle, he stops, he cuts himself off, and just says "Fuck the history lesson." I am inspired by the discipline and clarity of vision Diggs expresses in this moment.
I struggle to express it myself, however. As much as I would love to be able to explain to you in explicit, concrete, rational terms why precisely this was so difficult and painful to see, I have tried for a week to find the words, and I cannot, despite being white, despite my not being targeted personally by this video the way POC are. This is as direct as I can be with you right now.
One of the things I was taught early on, as far back as the '80s, is the queer equation silence = death. It took me a while to understand it, but I understand it now. The history of queerness is, in large part, the history of the struggle against being made silent and invisible. It is the struggle to exist.
Over the past few years queer voices in general, and trans and GNC voices specifically, have increasingly worked to make ourselves heard. We have platforms, and often these platforms are through social media. We have a voice on Twitter, on Youtube, and that has been a tremendous help and strength to me.
I have also seen, repeatedly and frequently, the ways in which Youtube amplifies voices of hatred and abuse. To communicate on the Internet - to write about music, to do my research - I have to take extraordinary steps to protect myself from these voices. I have seen the effect of these repeated, incessant amplified voices on other people, on people I care about, people who are important to me.
Knowing that this is what Google does - knowing that this is what Google profits from, that this is their business model - I just don't think I can trust them to amplify my voice. This saddens me. We have worked so hard to be heard, and yet we still have so, so much farther to go. And Google? Google will not take us there.
Thursday, 25 June 2020
Wednesday, 24 June 2020
Radio Tracklists 9-12
Oh shoot this one is going to be tricky. This one, see, is baroque harpsichord music, and to identify a piece you really need both the composer and performer, which is a pain in the butt to find.
Show #9 - harpsichord (compiled 2018-05-12)
Rousset - KK 120 Sonata in D Minor (Scarlatti)
Jean Rondeau - Vertigo (Pancrace Royer)
Pinnock - Suite in A Minor 4. Les Trois Mains (Rameau)
Unknown - La marche des Scythes (Pancrace Royer)
Rachel Podger, Marcin Świątkiewicz, Daniele Caminiti - Chicaona (Bertali)
Achucarro/Mata/LSO - Concerto for Harpsichord (de Falla)
Byron Schenkman - Cento Partite Sopra Passcaglia (Frescobaldi)
Show #10 - flying (compiled 2018-05-14)
The Oxfords - Flying Up Through The Sky
Marvin Gaye - Flyin' High (In the Friendly Sky)
John Cameron - Fly Away
Hiroki Kikuta - Can You Fly Sister
Brocas Helm - Fly High
Lionel Hampton - Flying Home No. 1
Steve Miller Band - Fly Like An Eagle
Venus Gang - Love to Fly
Kukl - Open the Window and Let the Spirit Fly Free
Astrud Gilberto - Fly Me to the Moon (In Other Words)
Yonin Bayashi - Flying
Monster Magnet - I Control, I Fly
Blaze Foley - If I Could Only Fly
Buffalo Springfield - Expecting to Fly
Glass Harp - High Fly
Julius Wechter & The Baja Marimba Band - Flyin' High
Bilal - Flying
Show #11 - plastic (compiled 2018-05-17)
Jefferson Airplane - Plastic Fantastic Lover (Sweeping Up the Spotlight)
Bitter Creek - Plastic Thunder
Night Sun - Plastic Shotgun
Dharma - Plastic doll (remixed instrumental)
Portishead - Plastic
Henson Cargill - Reprints (Plastic People)
Radiohead - Fake Plastic Trees
Mosaic - Plasticity
U.S. Girls - Rage of Plastics
Frank Zappa - Plastic People (Mystery Disc)
The Kinks - Plastic Man
Shobaleader One - Don't Go Plastic
Giles, Giles & Fripp - Plastic Pennies
Stereolab - Refractions in the Plastic Pulse Part 2
Stereolab - Refractions in the Plastic Pulse Part 4
Mariya Takeuchi - Plastic Love
Show #12 - WRONG DUDE (compiled 2018-05-22)
Bobby Brown - I Must Be Born
Living Color - Thank the Lord For Love
The Zombies - Zombi
MBV - Theme From Gun Court
Big Black - The Snakecharmer
The Eagles - Showa Nisei
Offspring - Deeper Magic
Ice Age - General Alert
Nirvana - Duh
Kid Rock - Doctor Rock
The Out Kast - Long Tall Sally
The Velvet Underground - Somebody to Love
XTC (X Dream, Troy & Cortex) - Untitled
Skid Row - An Awful Lot of Woman
The Temples - Hava Nagila (Twist)
The Cult - The Mail Must Go Through
Rush - Sobohla Manyosi
Smog - Nem Beszelhetsz Mindig Massal
Show #9 - harpsichord (compiled 2018-05-12)
Rousset - KK 120 Sonata in D Minor (Scarlatti)
Jean Rondeau - Vertigo (Pancrace Royer)
Pinnock - Suite in A Minor 4. Les Trois Mains (Rameau)
Unknown - La marche des Scythes (Pancrace Royer)
Rachel Podger, Marcin Świątkiewicz, Daniele Caminiti - Chicaona (Bertali)
Achucarro/Mata/LSO - Concerto for Harpsichord (de Falla)
Byron Schenkman - Cento Partite Sopra Passcaglia (Frescobaldi)
Show #10 - flying (compiled 2018-05-14)
The Oxfords - Flying Up Through The Sky
Marvin Gaye - Flyin' High (In the Friendly Sky)
John Cameron - Fly Away
Hiroki Kikuta - Can You Fly Sister
Brocas Helm - Fly High
Lionel Hampton - Flying Home No. 1
Steve Miller Band - Fly Like An Eagle
Venus Gang - Love to Fly
Kukl - Open the Window and Let the Spirit Fly Free
Astrud Gilberto - Fly Me to the Moon (In Other Words)
Yonin Bayashi - Flying
Monster Magnet - I Control, I Fly
Blaze Foley - If I Could Only Fly
Buffalo Springfield - Expecting to Fly
Glass Harp - High Fly
Julius Wechter & The Baja Marimba Band - Flyin' High
Bilal - Flying
Show #11 - plastic (compiled 2018-05-17)
Jefferson Airplane - Plastic Fantastic Lover (Sweeping Up the Spotlight)
Bitter Creek - Plastic Thunder
Night Sun - Plastic Shotgun
Dharma - Plastic doll (remixed instrumental)
Portishead - Plastic
Henson Cargill - Reprints (Plastic People)
Radiohead - Fake Plastic Trees
Mosaic - Plasticity
U.S. Girls - Rage of Plastics
Frank Zappa - Plastic People (Mystery Disc)
The Kinks - Plastic Man
Shobaleader One - Don't Go Plastic
Giles, Giles & Fripp - Plastic Pennies
Stereolab - Refractions in the Plastic Pulse Part 2
Stereolab - Refractions in the Plastic Pulse Part 4
Mariya Takeuchi - Plastic Love
Show #12 - WRONG DUDE (compiled 2018-05-22)
Bobby Brown - I Must Be Born
Living Color - Thank the Lord For Love
The Zombies - Zombi
MBV - Theme From Gun Court
Big Black - The Snakecharmer
The Eagles - Showa Nisei
Offspring - Deeper Magic
Ice Age - General Alert
Nirvana - Duh
Kid Rock - Doctor Rock
The Out Kast - Long Tall Sally
The Velvet Underground - Somebody to Love
XTC (X Dream, Troy & Cortex) - Untitled
Skid Row - An Awful Lot of Woman
The Temples - Hava Nagila (Twist)
The Cult - The Mail Must Go Through
Rush - Sobohla Manyosi
Smog - Nem Beszelhetsz Mindig Massal
Tuesday, 23 June 2020
Sparkly Vampires
Well I'm in a typing mood today I think... Sedric's blog post motivated me to throw together another quick hour-long mix. This one: Twilight, songs with the word Twilight in the title. By this time I can put together a playlist of most things and still have it turn out half-decent somehow, which is nice. Here's what we got:
Stuff Smith - Twilight in Turkey: A Raymond Scott tune, of course - this version is by legendary jazz violin "viper" Stuff Smith and it's some quality stuff.
Gentle Giant - Edge of Twilight: Honestly, Acquiring the Taste is one of my favorite Gentle Giant albums. They never did hardly any of it live, except for "Plain Truth" which I don't much like; it's very much a studio record, and it does some interesting things. OK, we don't get much of a consistent mood off this song but all of the things it does are good - the atmosphere of the main bit of the song is appropriately crepuscular. Is the tympani break strictly necessary? Well, no, but bringing in Mrs. Jacobsen's Eleventh Grade Percussion Ensemble doesn't bother me either.
Ursula K. LeGuin & Todd Barton - Twilight Song: From their 1985 cassette "Music and Poetry of the Kesh" - basically invented ethnography in a vaguely "new age" context. Le Guin is better as a writer of course but the tape is a very nice one.
Cornelius - Tone Twilight Zone: Aha! A ringer! This is a very good track from the middle of "Point", which is a fantastic Cornelius album. I had the great fortune to see him perform it live last year and it definitely depeened my appreciation of the record.
Robyn Hitchcock - Raining Twilight Coast: I am fond of his acoustic ballads collection "Eye", very much so, and I do consider this to be one of the more memorable tracks on that record.
Cuushe - Butterfly Case: A completely new one! Literally just added this one to my library three days ago. Ambient dream pop record from Japan. Got a 7.0 on Pitchfork and I guess never took off, I never heard of it until I happened across it at random a few days ago. Very much up my alley.
High Contrast - Twilight's Last Gleaming: Acclaimed drum 'n bass record from Wales, 2004. The title is of course a reference to the American national anthem, but if it's a political song I can't understand how. In any case: Excellent.
Manabu Namiki - Purple Twilight (Stage 2: Zenovia Airport): From the cult favorite soundtrack to the '98 arcade game Armed Police Batrider. I think there was also a Playstation port of some variety but the arcade version is the one that gets the love, justly so I would say.
Elysia Crampton Chuquimia - Rainbow Twilight Theme demo (2017): From a comp of her selected demos/DJ edits. It's clearly unfinished, but also pretty interesting and short and fits where it's at.
Ustad Saami - Twilight: His record "God Is Not A Terrorist" from last year got a certain amount of acclaim, was a powerful and resonant message. It's also some very good Qawwali. Qawwali isn't necessarily an art form suited to the album format, but then again it's not necessarily suited to the mix CD format either, and if this mere ten and a half minutes lacks the full impact of a longer performance it can go places a longer performance can't.
Shin Jung Hyun & The Men - Twilight: The artist and song title is transliterated various ways. On the "Beautiful Rivers and Mountains" comp, for instance, this track is rendered "Sunset". The version on the earlier various-artists comp "Forge Your Own Chains", however, renders the title "Twilight". Either way, we're dealing with a superlative song once more.
Genesis - Twilight Alehouse: This really is one of my favorite Genesis songs; I've put it on all kinds of mixes. This very early tune of theirs, a sad ballad about drinking to forget a lost love that turns into a flute solo that I surprisingly like a lot, even though I'm not overall particularly fond of flute solos, seldom fails to click with me emotionally.
Denki Groove ~ Schadaraparr - Twilight: Oh, it's an excuse to put Cornelius on a mix twice! I will take it. This remix uses a lot of the sounds from his song "Music". The original track probably sounds very little like this remix, but the hook is... (chef's kiss). Combined with the backing to Music, it's... probably average for Cornelius, which means it's superb.
I can think of worse ways to kill an hour.
Stuff Smith - Twilight in Turkey: A Raymond Scott tune, of course - this version is by legendary jazz violin "viper" Stuff Smith and it's some quality stuff.
Gentle Giant - Edge of Twilight: Honestly, Acquiring the Taste is one of my favorite Gentle Giant albums. They never did hardly any of it live, except for "Plain Truth" which I don't much like; it's very much a studio record, and it does some interesting things. OK, we don't get much of a consistent mood off this song but all of the things it does are good - the atmosphere of the main bit of the song is appropriately crepuscular. Is the tympani break strictly necessary? Well, no, but bringing in Mrs. Jacobsen's Eleventh Grade Percussion Ensemble doesn't bother me either.
Ursula K. LeGuin & Todd Barton - Twilight Song: From their 1985 cassette "Music and Poetry of the Kesh" - basically invented ethnography in a vaguely "new age" context. Le Guin is better as a writer of course but the tape is a very nice one.
Cornelius - Tone Twilight Zone: Aha! A ringer! This is a very good track from the middle of "Point", which is a fantastic Cornelius album. I had the great fortune to see him perform it live last year and it definitely depeened my appreciation of the record.
Robyn Hitchcock - Raining Twilight Coast: I am fond of his acoustic ballads collection "Eye", very much so, and I do consider this to be one of the more memorable tracks on that record.
Cuushe - Butterfly Case: A completely new one! Literally just added this one to my library three days ago. Ambient dream pop record from Japan. Got a 7.0 on Pitchfork and I guess never took off, I never heard of it until I happened across it at random a few days ago. Very much up my alley.
High Contrast - Twilight's Last Gleaming: Acclaimed drum 'n bass record from Wales, 2004. The title is of course a reference to the American national anthem, but if it's a political song I can't understand how. In any case: Excellent.
Manabu Namiki - Purple Twilight (Stage 2: Zenovia Airport): From the cult favorite soundtrack to the '98 arcade game Armed Police Batrider. I think there was also a Playstation port of some variety but the arcade version is the one that gets the love, justly so I would say.
Elysia Crampton Chuquimia - Rainbow Twilight Theme demo (2017): From a comp of her selected demos/DJ edits. It's clearly unfinished, but also pretty interesting and short and fits where it's at.
Ustad Saami - Twilight: His record "God Is Not A Terrorist" from last year got a certain amount of acclaim, was a powerful and resonant message. It's also some very good Qawwali. Qawwali isn't necessarily an art form suited to the album format, but then again it's not necessarily suited to the mix CD format either, and if this mere ten and a half minutes lacks the full impact of a longer performance it can go places a longer performance can't.
Shin Jung Hyun & The Men - Twilight: The artist and song title is transliterated various ways. On the "Beautiful Rivers and Mountains" comp, for instance, this track is rendered "Sunset". The version on the earlier various-artists comp "Forge Your Own Chains", however, renders the title "Twilight". Either way, we're dealing with a superlative song once more.
Genesis - Twilight Alehouse: This really is one of my favorite Genesis songs; I've put it on all kinds of mixes. This very early tune of theirs, a sad ballad about drinking to forget a lost love that turns into a flute solo that I surprisingly like a lot, even though I'm not overall particularly fond of flute solos, seldom fails to click with me emotionally.
Denki Groove ~ Schadaraparr - Twilight: Oh, it's an excuse to put Cornelius on a mix twice! I will take it. This remix uses a lot of the sounds from his song "Music". The original track probably sounds very little like this remix, but the hook is... (chef's kiss). Combined with the backing to Music, it's... probably average for Cornelius, which means it's superb.
I can think of worse ways to kill an hour.
re: expensive typos
One of the lesser-known expensive typos in entertainment history involved a legendary unbroadcast pilot produced for UPN. The story, as it is told, goes that an unnamed UPN executive was interested in getting a pilot made for a potential US version of the 1991-92 German TV series "The Jolly Joker". Unfortunately, the memo, which must have been scant on other details, supposedly instead gave the green light to the production of a pilot for "The Jolly Joiker". Thus was spawned a late '90s pilot starring a gentleman of Sami ancestry. The pilot, which is alleged to have cost $250,000, was set in LA, and was a sort of twist on Manimal, in which its star could, by singing a Sami _joik_ about any given animal, summon up that animal to ward off evil. The pilot allegedly culminated in a reindeer goring an evil business executive who was involved in predatory real estate deals.
Skepticism about this story is well-warranted - those small bits seeming to confirm the story, such as script pages, could well be easily faked. One knows how well urban legends proliferate in the Internet age.
Apparently more well-documented is the story of the secretly female video game character predating Metroid's Samus Aran. This character, Toby "Kissy" Masuyo, was the star of a 1985 Namco arcade game. Wikipedia also claims that, in the "Mr. Driller" series of games, "Kissy" is the ex-wife of Taizo Hori, better known as "Dig Dug", and is accordingly an antagonistic character in that series of games.
Skepticism about this story is well-warranted - those small bits seeming to confirm the story, such as script pages, could well be easily faked. One knows how well urban legends proliferate in the Internet age.
Apparently more well-documented is the story of the secretly female video game character predating Metroid's Samus Aran. This character, Toby "Kissy" Masuyo, was the star of a 1985 Namco arcade game. Wikipedia also claims that, in the "Mr. Driller" series of games, "Kissy" is the ex-wife of Taizo Hori, better known as "Dig Dug", and is accordingly an antagonistic character in that series of games.
Turing Test 2: The Deadly Art of Illusion
An offhand mention Sedric made of the early "AI" Eliza had me thinking about the nature of artificial intelligence, its goals, the ways in which humans hope to shape it and the things they are afraid of.
It strikes me that the overt goal of the Turing Test is imposture - a machine is defined by Turing as "intelligent" when it can persuasively pretend to be something it is not. I can't imagine where Turing, who would eventually be punished severely for the crime of being homosexual, might have gotten such a strange idea.
This rootedness in duplicity has shadowed our discussions of "artificial intelligence" ever since. Having set an explicit goal of teaching machines to convincingly lie, we simultaneously panic over the distinct possibility that some day, a machine might learn to convincingly lie.
I'll tell you what - I'm not a machine, I don't really understand machines, I don't know if or how they think, but I am fascinated by what the machines we choose to build say about us.
The first two groundbreaking AIs were Eliza and Parry. They are very different but I understand how these both were groundbreaking. Early work with AI, at the very least, spent less time exploring the possibilities of machine learning than it did exploring the human psyche.
Because both Eliza and Parry were simple parlor tricks, fairly easy for the rational mind to understand and see through. They relied less on making a machine capable of rich and meaningful conversation, but by emulating human beings who could be expected to have a fairly restricted range of expression.
Eliza, I would say, is the "light side" version. A virtual therapist, all she really does is what is called "mirroring" - she reads the words a user types in and rephrases them. This makes her a better conversationalist than many human beings I have known. Humans have a profound desire to be heard, a desire that is more important than the desire to actually listen to other people, so conversations between humans have a tendency to boil down people telling each other their thoughts and feelings without so much as acknowledging the thoughts and feelings of others. Eliza, having no thoughts and feelings of her own, can devote herself full-time to being a mirror. It is no wonder, and no crime, that so many people were transfixed by her.
Parry takes the opposite tack. Parry - short for "paranoid" - emulated the sort of person who was not going to listen to what the user said anyway. When I get paranoid, which I do sometimes, I am so overcome by intrusive thoughts that I have difficulty listening to or understanding what other people say. I become monomaniacal, irrational, at some times incomprehensible. A machine can very easily ape this state, which is, I suspect, as much a para-communicative state than a direct form of communication. The best I can ever get out of a conversation with someone who is truly paranoid is "something bad wrong with that person".
(A conclusion would go here, if I had one. I do not.)
It strikes me that the overt goal of the Turing Test is imposture - a machine is defined by Turing as "intelligent" when it can persuasively pretend to be something it is not. I can't imagine where Turing, who would eventually be punished severely for the crime of being homosexual, might have gotten such a strange idea.
This rootedness in duplicity has shadowed our discussions of "artificial intelligence" ever since. Having set an explicit goal of teaching machines to convincingly lie, we simultaneously panic over the distinct possibility that some day, a machine might learn to convincingly lie.
I'll tell you what - I'm not a machine, I don't really understand machines, I don't know if or how they think, but I am fascinated by what the machines we choose to build say about us.
The first two groundbreaking AIs were Eliza and Parry. They are very different but I understand how these both were groundbreaking. Early work with AI, at the very least, spent less time exploring the possibilities of machine learning than it did exploring the human psyche.
Because both Eliza and Parry were simple parlor tricks, fairly easy for the rational mind to understand and see through. They relied less on making a machine capable of rich and meaningful conversation, but by emulating human beings who could be expected to have a fairly restricted range of expression.
Eliza, I would say, is the "light side" version. A virtual therapist, all she really does is what is called "mirroring" - she reads the words a user types in and rephrases them. This makes her a better conversationalist than many human beings I have known. Humans have a profound desire to be heard, a desire that is more important than the desire to actually listen to other people, so conversations between humans have a tendency to boil down people telling each other their thoughts and feelings without so much as acknowledging the thoughts and feelings of others. Eliza, having no thoughts and feelings of her own, can devote herself full-time to being a mirror. It is no wonder, and no crime, that so many people were transfixed by her.
Parry takes the opposite tack. Parry - short for "paranoid" - emulated the sort of person who was not going to listen to what the user said anyway. When I get paranoid, which I do sometimes, I am so overcome by intrusive thoughts that I have difficulty listening to or understanding what other people say. I become monomaniacal, irrational, at some times incomprehensible. A machine can very easily ape this state, which is, I suspect, as much a para-communicative state than a direct form of communication. The best I can ever get out of a conversation with someone who is truly paranoid is "something bad wrong with that person".
(A conclusion would go here, if I had one. I do not.)
Radio Show Tracklists 5-8
Next batch. Honestly I don't think these ones are that great comparatively, but I figure I might as well get this documented, particularly given that it took me like two days to even find these damn things.
Show #5: cat woman ball (compiled 2018-05-05)
Abaco Dream - Cat Woman
Pati Yang - Giant Cat Woman
Light Year - Giant Babies
Smokey - Million Dollar Babies (Alt Version)
Fairport Convention - Million Dollar Bash
Don Ellis - Brash Brass Bash (demo)
The Beastie Boys - Brass Monkey
ARPADYS - Monkey Star
Elvis Presley - Black Star
Necromantia - Black Mirror
Jay Bennett - Mirror Ball
Prince - The Ball
Show #6: unknown (compiled 2018-05-05)
Unknown Artist - Three Little Tones (I Love You)
Unknown Artist (Sanders Recording Acetate) - Audio Track 4
Unknown Artist - Red Hen Hop
Unknown Artist - Paranoid Dancer
Unknown Artist - Let Me
Unknown Artist - Tukhanam Kachamiri
Unknown Artist - Drown On Wings
Unknown Artist (Glorious African Music Vol II) - Unknown
Unknown Artist - Remix Pongdut Semi
Unknown Artist - Melography
Unknown Artist (Unknown Fibers "Odd-Lots") - A1
Unknown Artist - Unknown (no further info available)
Unknown Artist - Can't Stop The Want I Got For You Babe
Unknown Artist - Unknown Omega Studio Acetate
Unknown Artist - Unreleased Nigerian Boogie
Show #7: i dont want to prejudice you (compiled 2018-05-06)
The Focus Group - Look Hear Now!
Asha Bhosle & Chorus - Hey You
Hans Keller - Pink Floyd Interview
Guilty Razors - Lucifer Sam
Pink Floyd - Song 1
Sixting Music - Apples & Oranges
Judy Dyble - See Emily Play (Spindle)
David Gilmour - Mihalis (CBS Promos 1978)
Nick Mason - Crust
B Bruno - Comfortably Numb
Syd Barrett - Let's Split
The Barretts - Let's Roll Another One
Pink Floyd - Travel Sequence
Pink Floyd - Crumbling Land (fast)
Rosebud - Main Theme
Barrett/Wolfberg/Gregoropoulos - Opel
Pink Floyd - Eclipse (live 1972-01-21)
Show #8 - one deadly word (compiled 2018-05-11)
Neung Phak - Fucking USA
Eugene Chadbourne - Nazi Punks Fuck Off/Foggy Mountain Breakdown
Slugabed - Fuck Station Zero
Melkbelly - Twin Looking Motherfucker
Television - Fuck Rock 'n Roll
John Cale - Fucking Your Neighbors Wife
Max Graef & Glenn Astro - Where the Fuck Are My Hard Boiled Eggs?!
Mission of Burma - So Fuck It
$HIT AND $HINE - Fuck That
that dog. - Fuck You
Tuomas Henrikin Jeesuksen Kristuksen Bandi - Fuck Off And Die
Markus Sommer - Fucked Up Dinosauri
John Zorn - Fuck the Facts
Nickelus F & Shawn Kemp - Clusterfuck
Armand Schaubroeck Steals - Ratfucker
Idiot Flesh - Motherfucker
Show #5: cat woman ball (compiled 2018-05-05)
Abaco Dream - Cat Woman
Pati Yang - Giant Cat Woman
Light Year - Giant Babies
Smokey - Million Dollar Babies (Alt Version)
Fairport Convention - Million Dollar Bash
Don Ellis - Brash Brass Bash (demo)
The Beastie Boys - Brass Monkey
ARPADYS - Monkey Star
Elvis Presley - Black Star
Necromantia - Black Mirror
Jay Bennett - Mirror Ball
Prince - The Ball
Show #6: unknown (compiled 2018-05-05)
Unknown Artist - Three Little Tones (I Love You)
Unknown Artist (Sanders Recording Acetate) - Audio Track 4
Unknown Artist - Red Hen Hop
Unknown Artist - Paranoid Dancer
Unknown Artist - Let Me
Unknown Artist - Tukhanam Kachamiri
Unknown Artist - Drown On Wings
Unknown Artist (Glorious African Music Vol II) - Unknown
Unknown Artist - Remix Pongdut Semi
Unknown Artist - Melography
Unknown Artist (Unknown Fibers "Odd-Lots") - A1
Unknown Artist - Unknown (no further info available)
Unknown Artist - Can't Stop The Want I Got For You Babe
Unknown Artist - Unknown Omega Studio Acetate
Unknown Artist - Unreleased Nigerian Boogie
Show #7: i dont want to prejudice you (compiled 2018-05-06)
The Focus Group - Look Hear Now!
Asha Bhosle & Chorus - Hey You
Hans Keller - Pink Floyd Interview
Guilty Razors - Lucifer Sam
Pink Floyd - Song 1
Sixting Music - Apples & Oranges
Judy Dyble - See Emily Play (Spindle)
David Gilmour - Mihalis (CBS Promos 1978)
Nick Mason - Crust
B Bruno - Comfortably Numb
Syd Barrett - Let's Split
The Barretts - Let's Roll Another One
Pink Floyd - Travel Sequence
Pink Floyd - Crumbling Land (fast)
Rosebud - Main Theme
Barrett/Wolfberg/Gregoropoulos - Opel
Pink Floyd - Eclipse (live 1972-01-21)
Show #8 - one deadly word (compiled 2018-05-11)
Neung Phak - Fucking USA
Eugene Chadbourne - Nazi Punks Fuck Off/Foggy Mountain Breakdown
Slugabed - Fuck Station Zero
Melkbelly - Twin Looking Motherfucker
Television - Fuck Rock 'n Roll
John Cale - Fucking Your Neighbors Wife
Max Graef & Glenn Astro - Where the Fuck Are My Hard Boiled Eggs?!
Mission of Burma - So Fuck It
$HIT AND $HINE - Fuck That
that dog. - Fuck You
Tuomas Henrikin Jeesuksen Kristuksen Bandi - Fuck Off And Die
Markus Sommer - Fucked Up Dinosauri
John Zorn - Fuck the Facts
Nickelus F & Shawn Kemp - Clusterfuck
Armand Schaubroeck Steals - Ratfucker
Idiot Flesh - Motherfucker
Monday, 22 June 2020
Lysenko, Thompson, and the Politicization of Science
So we're a little off the beaten path for this blog, but you know what, there's enough detritus here that I feel like going with it. A friend of mine shared a picture that had gone viral on Twitter - a photo of a gentleman by the name of Yuri Knorozov holding his Siamese cat Aspid. The photo is undated and unsourced so I can't tell you more than that.
Me being who I am I wanted to know more about this Knorozov fellow, and I did find his story interesting. The whole page is here, so you can see if I'm getting anything wrong here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Knorozov
So the first thing I read is about what he did during the Great Patriotic War. The article says that he was an artillery spotter. Clicking through to that article I find that an artillery spotter is also sometimes known as a FISTer.
Right, enough with the rude jokes. What did Knorozov actually do? He was a linguist. Ah! Linguistics is a particular amateur interest of mine. It turns out that he brilliantly analyzed the Maya codices, finding them to be a syllabary, in a paper published in 1952, and after 1975, this view became increasingly accepted.
Ah, and what about the intervening period? Well, you see, the leading Mayanist of the day, a British gentleman named J. Eric S. Thompson, disagreed with Knorozov's findings, and unleashed all sorts of attacks. He put in strenuous effort to discredit Knorozov's work, on such rational arguments such as that he was publishing in the Soviet Union, and you couldn't trust anything those dirty commies had to say, could you?
This certainly is something I was taught and believed. Long before I ever heard of Knorozov I knew about the infamous case of Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko, you see, had some brilliant ideas about biology. They were completely wrong, to the point where Wikipedia characterizes these ideas as "pseudoscience", and as a result agronomy as a science in the Soviet Union suffered severely under Lysenkoism. In a way, well, not entirely dissimilar to the way that Mayanism as a scientific discipline suffered under Thompson.
Wikipedia does _not_ characterize Thompson's ideas as "pseudoscience", which is very generous of them. It also is entirely congruent with what I was taught about science and its politicization. Science, we were told, suffered irreparably under the totalitarian thumb of the Soviet Union, because in that country, unlike in our free and open democracy, science was politicized there. This was why America, of course, won the Cold War - because of our superior commitment to Scientific Freedom. OK, yes, the commies made it to space before us, but they cheated, they didn't play fair. They stole all of _our_ scientific knowledge in order for advantage, scientific knowledge we, uh, presumably got fair and square from the Nazis? I don't know, when I try to lay out the argument it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Please do not take me for a tankie. Please do not think for one second that I am defending or justifying in any way the work of Stalin's brutal and totalitarian regime, that I am making the much mocked "and you are lynching [redacted]" argument that was so commonly forwarded by the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is a defunct polity, and good riddance, even if its capitalist replacement is, well, hard to characterize as any sort of an improvement.
Mainly the reason this interests me is that I was raised with a large number of political assumptions, assumptions I have gradually shed over the past four years. Reading has been, and continues to be, an important part of that process for me. This is why I love the obscure. There are many reasons things can be obscure, and while I am not generally fond of conspiratorial thinking, I certainly do recognize that there are certain things in this world I've been taught to ignore or take for granted for a very long time. Naming and empirically challenging those assumptions has been very productive for me, and it's a habit I would encourage in others.
Me being who I am I wanted to know more about this Knorozov fellow, and I did find his story interesting. The whole page is here, so you can see if I'm getting anything wrong here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Knorozov
So the first thing I read is about what he did during the Great Patriotic War. The article says that he was an artillery spotter. Clicking through to that article I find that an artillery spotter is also sometimes known as a FISTer.
Right, enough with the rude jokes. What did Knorozov actually do? He was a linguist. Ah! Linguistics is a particular amateur interest of mine. It turns out that he brilliantly analyzed the Maya codices, finding them to be a syllabary, in a paper published in 1952, and after 1975, this view became increasingly accepted.
Ah, and what about the intervening period? Well, you see, the leading Mayanist of the day, a British gentleman named J. Eric S. Thompson, disagreed with Knorozov's findings, and unleashed all sorts of attacks. He put in strenuous effort to discredit Knorozov's work, on such rational arguments such as that he was publishing in the Soviet Union, and you couldn't trust anything those dirty commies had to say, could you?
This certainly is something I was taught and believed. Long before I ever heard of Knorozov I knew about the infamous case of Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko, you see, had some brilliant ideas about biology. They were completely wrong, to the point where Wikipedia characterizes these ideas as "pseudoscience", and as a result agronomy as a science in the Soviet Union suffered severely under Lysenkoism. In a way, well, not entirely dissimilar to the way that Mayanism as a scientific discipline suffered under Thompson.
Wikipedia does _not_ characterize Thompson's ideas as "pseudoscience", which is very generous of them. It also is entirely congruent with what I was taught about science and its politicization. Science, we were told, suffered irreparably under the totalitarian thumb of the Soviet Union, because in that country, unlike in our free and open democracy, science was politicized there. This was why America, of course, won the Cold War - because of our superior commitment to Scientific Freedom. OK, yes, the commies made it to space before us, but they cheated, they didn't play fair. They stole all of _our_ scientific knowledge in order for advantage, scientific knowledge we, uh, presumably got fair and square from the Nazis? I don't know, when I try to lay out the argument it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Please do not take me for a tankie. Please do not think for one second that I am defending or justifying in any way the work of Stalin's brutal and totalitarian regime, that I am making the much mocked "and you are lynching [redacted]" argument that was so commonly forwarded by the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is a defunct polity, and good riddance, even if its capitalist replacement is, well, hard to characterize as any sort of an improvement.
Mainly the reason this interests me is that I was raised with a large number of political assumptions, assumptions I have gradually shed over the past four years. Reading has been, and continues to be, an important part of that process for me. This is why I love the obscure. There are many reasons things can be obscure, and while I am not generally fond of conspiratorial thinking, I certainly do recognize that there are certain things in this world I've been taught to ignore or take for granted for a very long time. Naming and empirically challenging those assumptions has been very productive for me, and it's a habit I would encourage in others.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)